W.C.W. THE PRE-EMPTIVE STRIKE.

THE PRE-EMPTIVE STRIKE IS NOT WING CHUN. BUT IT MIGHT BE.

Without intending to sound like a broken record Training is not Fighting, what you learn in training you may never use in a fight and of course training in Wing Chun is teaching you Wing Chun and not teaching you how to fight.

Wing Chun has a certain philosophy and if you are doing something with a Wing Chun shape or Wing Chun idea that does not follow the Wing Chun Philosophy then it is simply not Wing Chun.

This is a very grey area and will depend to a very large extent on what you identify as Wing Chun Philosophy.

With my own Students I often divert a class away from our usual Wing Chun to a more general idea about dealing with a violent attacker, we look at options such as Small Joint Manipulation, Improvised Weapons, Throws and Pre-emptive Strikes. We approach all of our work from the standpoint of Wing Chun but there can be no doubt that these ideas are not part of the Wing Chun Canon and as such they are not and can never be Wing Chun.

If we take our clues from the oral tradition of Wing Chun Maxims we find…

There are numerous similar Maxims that make it quite obvious that Wing Chun does not instigate the attack, that it allows in fact requires the antagonist to genuinely attack us.

There is no Maxim that says ……. If in doubt strike out.

Despite the fact that I do teach a choice selection of powerful and effective non Wing Chun Applications I personally prefer and recommend that we do not act first.

But if you find yourself in trouble it is YOU that makes the call, the fact that you train in Wing Chun does not bind you in any way to using it.

Something that cannot be replicated in training and as such is often not considered anywhere near enough is that when an attacker in a Street Situation throws a Punch or Kick at you he will not be feinting, he genuinely expects it to connect and it is the only thing he is thinking about.

There is no little voice warning him to watch out for the counter. If you can step inside his attack he will be as good as “Blind and Defenceless” {opting for a Pre-emptive Strike has the potential to put you in this very same position}.

The later I can leave my response to my opponent the deeper is his investment in what he is committing to, this is the true Wing Chun way, simultaneous Defence and Attack, just as he thinks his blow is about to land on me mine lands on him.

The reason this is such a Grey Area is that it is possible for us to strike the opponent before he has started his Strike without instigating the Violence, without us striking pre-emptively and giving the opponent the opportunity to step inside our attack.

What constitutes an ATTACK?

If you truly believe that the situation you are in will definitely go off at what point do you decide the attack has began? How and when do I attack inside of his attack?

There is little or no difference between an attacker hurling a tirade of abuse at you as there is with fists being thrown. He is into it, it will of worked for him before and he is expecting it to work again.

It is part of his Fighting M.O.

When people are using Verbal Violence it often has a form and a structure even if this is unknown to the attacker themselves, it is rare that they will attack mid sentence, Verbal abuse is always 2 dimensional, partly to make you anxious and defencive but partly to talk themselves up, to make themselves braver.

Even if it is as clipped as “You “F***ing C**t” it is intended to be thrown at you as a complete sentence, so if you launch into them as they reach “ing” you will be attacking inside their attack.

My Royal Marine Corps. Uncle, my very first Fighting Instructor, would tell me that “if the Bad Guy is running his mouth shove your Fist in it”!

That advice sprung me from many sticky situations {it also got me a valuable street reputation as a kid not to mess with that was very good at keeping me safe}.

Typical things that happen are when Guys Flare their Arms out and come up to push their Head onto yours. As they flare their Arms out you can turn their lights out.

Once a Guy has lost the ability to put sentences together and is only using words of one syllable the Physical attack is only seconds away and at this point you hardly exist as a person, hit them with anything they will not see it.

There is a mass of information on the Net that clearly shows the advantage of landing the first strike in a fight, even if it is not a telling strike, in excess of 90% of altercations are won by the person that lands the first blow {although I am not sure who did the counting on this}.

There are of course Ethical and Legal Issues that you need to have made some kind of personal resolution to well before you get in any violent situation, if it is going off you will not waste time thinking about the fine print, but understanding the possible flow on will help you build a strategy based on understanding that the attacker was in the process of attacking, if nothing else it will make you believable in your explanation to the Police or Courts should that ever happen.

One final consideration is that no matter how good you are at training you will at best be only 50% of this person once reality happens, because of this just about everything you know will fail, so keep it really simple, in most situations a Bitch Slap is a better option than an Elbow Strike.